Disclaimer: I've submitted a few patches to RSpec but I can't claim to
be a heavyweight participant in the development process. So bear in
mind that my perspective might not might be as well-informed as that
of others, but here are my thoughts anyway.
Let's think for a moment about who our target audiences are:
1. Vanilla RSpec users
These users want to be able to checkout just the RSpec code, so it
makes sense that it live in its own repository.
2. Rails RSpec users
These users want to be able to checkout this and the RSpec code, so
again it makes sense that it live in its own repository.
3. People hacking on RSpec itself
It's for this group that rspec-dev.git exists, and it exists (or
_should_ exist) for the sole purpose of providing a convenient way of
doing the "meta" tasks involved in RSpec development: ie. testing the
three main parts of RSpec, setting up the example Rails app, packaging
releases and so forth. If something about rspec-dev.git is starting to
feel like a PITA then it's obviously not fulfilling its purpose of
"providing a _convenient_ way..."
4. Users of the TextMate bundle
Obviously, these are members of groups 1, 2 and 3, and need this to
live in a separate repo for installation purposes.
As I see it, rspec-dev.git should be almost static: once it's set up
right there should be very few commits to it and there should be very
little ongoing maintenance work on it.
The optimal workflow as I envisage it is the following.
- Have the developer clone the three or four repos, all in the same
directory; ie.
git clone ../path/to/rspec-dev.git
git clone ../path/to/rspec.git
git clone ../path/to/rspec-rails.git
git clone ../path/to/rspec-tmbundle.git
This is a once-off set-up and doesn't really justify having a Rake
task IMO.
The idea of having multiple git repos nested inside a master repo
makes me feel decidedly uncomfortable. Submodules is the only
"supported" way of doing that, and it was tried and rejected because
the submodule system is really designed for a different type of
problem than the one RSpec is trying to solve. Nesting repos inside
one another sets off alarm bells: if they really are _that_
interdependent then why do we have separate repos in the first place?
But we want separate repos for ease of end-user consumption, so
doesn't that mean that we haven't really achieved a sufficient degree
of independence?
You should be able to work in these repositories independently of one
another without having to worry about too many meta issues. ie. if you
have a bug to solve in "rspec" you should be able to work inside that
repository and not have to think about the others. Only at the end of
the process do you worry about the "meta" issue of running the
granddaddy pre_commit task in rspec-dev.
- Running the spec suite
You should be able to run the spec suite for each of the repositories
independently of the others. ie. you should be able to cd into the
rspec clone and do a "rake spec" or "spec spec" (why is it "spec spec/
spec?").
Likewise, you should be able to cd into the rspec-rails clone and do
"rake spec". Where should the example Rails app go? Evidently inside
rspec-rails, ignored appropriately using .gitignore, and with symlinks
to the relevant bits. Putting the rspec-rails repo _inside_ the Rails
app just seems wrong. If the symlink thing doesn't work (as David
indicates) then it's a bug in Rails, I suspect, and should be fixed,
but in the meantime a simple Rake task should suffice to do a
temporary copy instead of a symlink.
- "Meta" tasks
So what's left? The "meta" tasks for stuff you do in rspec-dev, like
the pre_commit and such. As I said, once rspec-dev is set up "right"
it really shouldn't be a maintenance burden and if it is we've done
something wrong.
If you keep your repos up-to-date before you start working on an issue
then there's less time for merge conflicts to arise. If the
independence of the repositories is sufficient then you won't want or
need to make changes to multiple repos at once, so you should be able
to "git pull" in each and have a basically instant fast-forward merge.
If the repositories really are isolated and you structure your commits
with adequate separation then you should rarely/never need to do a set
of commits that span multiple repositories, and if you do you should
be doing them in the right order anyway (ie. while adding a new
feature to rspec-rails you expose a latent bug in rspec causing
failure in rspec rails? obviously the fix to rspec should be
independent and go into rspec beforehand anyway).
So what does the workflow look like?
- you always work on topic branches
- ideally, your topic branches should be confined to _one_ of the repos
- we can take advantage of the structure of the repositories to
provide some convenience scripts for doing things like updating/
rebasing all the repos at once, but the working patterns should be
such that these rebases should be "fast forwards" 90% of the time
I don't know if I've explained my thinking very well here, but the
basic message I was trying to communicate was that:
1. Having multiple repos is a good thing because it makes consumption
easy for end users; and RSpec exists for end users.
2. If having multiple repos starts to feel like hard work then its
kind of like code smell; it's "maintenance smell" that indicates that
something isn't right, but we should be able to fix it.
Cheers,
Wincent